Sea Control - Sea Control 442 - Australia, India & Undersea Cables with Dr. Pooja Bhatt

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Links1. "Protecting Indian Ocean submarine cables: Exploring Australia-India cooperation," by Dr. Pooja Bhatt, ORF Online, June 1, 2023. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. My guest today is Dr. Pooja Bhatt, and we're going to discuss her article for ORF Online about how and why Australia and India should cooperate to protect undersea infrastructure. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. We are once again looking for audio editors, so if you're interested in learning how we put these podcasts together and think you'd be able to learn some basic editing skills, drop us a note at seacontrol at simsec.org. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on our website at SimSec.org, so if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Met.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Pooja Bhatt, and we'll be discussing her article in ORF Online, Protecting Indian Ocean Submarine Cables, Exploring Australia-India Cooperation. So, Pooja, welcome aboard. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about yourself, please? Hi, Jared, and thank you for having me for this podcast. I'm really happy to be here.

So I am Dr. Pooja Bhatt, and I am currently a consultant with Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. However, I'm mostly a maritime researcher, and I write and publish on various issues on maritime security and governance-related subjects. So that's about me. Well, as a reminder to our listeners, all opinions are our own, not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So Pooja, we'll start with what is Digital India 2015 and what role do submarine cables play in recognizing that vision? Because I don't think Digital India 2015 is well known here in the States.

Correct. So Digital India is a flagship program of the government of India. The entire vision of this program is to transform India into digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. So the basic pillars of this is develop everything on digital infrastructure, providing digitally enabled governance and services on demand, as well as providing more digital empowerment to citizens. So it's a conscious effort of Government of India to provide more digitally enabled services to the citizens in the country. And it actually covers a whole lot of areas such as health care, medical issues, then your banking and finance transaction. One of the flagship programs is the UPI payment, which is the online payment system that has transformed how we make our payments online now to using a mobile system. So all this require high internet speed, you know, for the delivery of services, real time transaction, and also requires safe and secure cyberspace. So given that kind of, you know, context in mind, I realized that it all requires subsea cables, which are crucial for, you know, conduit of telecommunication.

It requires reducing of latency. It requires increasing of bandwidth. For both these things, these are required because satellites lack these kind of quality. So given that context, I realized that India does not have the real time, you know, jurisdictional and legislative or even physical protection measures given the Nord Stream, even that we saw earlier this year that how the pipeline was blown off. And so basically undersea infrastructure is quite under tension at the moment. So I just thought, what can India do in given this kind of context in terms of protecting its own infrastructure undersea? And with that idea, I wanted to come up with this idea that India and Australia can come up together and collaborate in the issues and work together.

Why did you pick Australia as a potential ideal partner for India? So there would be two reasons, I would say. First of all, both the countries are important partners in the Indo-Pacific. So they're already cooperating a whole lot of issues and sectors. There has been a lot of high level visits from both Australia and India towards each other. And they already have comprehensive strategy partnerships. So the groundwork is already set. both countries have shared vision on maritime cooperation they share same values same norms when it comes to protection and safeguarding of maritime domain so i think the ground ground was already set all we wanted to understand how we can build upon it and while doing this reading on you

know while doing researching on how india can work together and protecting its submarine cables infrastructure i came across this very interesting legislature that australia has currently and Australia and New Zealand are only two countries at the moment that have this dedicated regime, which declares certain zones for the protection of undersea cables. And I found that Australia's legislation is world leading because it provides a template for the protection of these cables, which India can replicate also. So that is why I thought Australia is a very good partner for India to collaborate. All right, perfect transition. So what is Australia's cable protection zone regime can you explain it a little bit more so um the australia's uh

cable protection zones came sometime in 2005 when there was harvard government and they basically provide establish these zones within the exclusive economic zones which is the from the baseline to 200 nautical miles within that zone you have that kind of you know space provided by unclosed and unclosed provided this clause also united nation convention on the laws of seas provide this uh you know i would say a gray area where it does say that nations can you know protect their they can put and protect their undersea cables and everything uh it does not expand into how to go about it so that remains a gray area and i think australia did use that kind of uh you know lacuna in the gray area in the jurisdiction to build up these kind of this kind

of uh protection zone and uh they how they started was this first uh went about uh established you know national legislation which is called telecommunications act and uh since then they have been like two i think 2005 and 2014 they have a these legislative acts actually allow the domestic regulator of Australia which is Australian Communications and Media Authority ACMA to safeguard these international submarines which are landing in Australia. So after this legislation was passed it allowed them to establish these protection zones. So in 2007 under ACMA act they established three zones one was in northern Sydney one was in southern Sydney and another was Perth, what it allows Australia is to prohibit and restrict activities such as trawling, sand mining,

vessel anchoring, dredging and certain activities which can actually risk the seabed of these protected zones. At the same time, it also prohibits certain kind of fishing and shipping vessels in their jurisdiction. So it provides a huge range of protection because it It, you know, filters out a lot, many vessels which can potentially damage these submarine cables. So it allows them to filter them out. And also at the same time, all the telecommunication carriers who want to establish their submarine cables within those zones also need to take ACMA's, Australia's permit to establish that. So what Australia did was first put up a legislative body, basically. And based on that, they provided three zones. I think it was a very gradual and a very intelligent move to do so.

And it provides them a lot of jurisdictional power over these areas. So I thought that was a very good move by Australia, which can be replicated not only by India, but other countries were also looking for protection of their submarine cables in their EZs, basically. What would an Indian version of Australia's CPZ regime look like? Is it simple enough to take the language that Australia has already developed and just apply it to the Indian EEZ? Or are there some nuances there that are not obvious to someone looking at it from the outside? so that's a good question actually it's also complicated because india does not have any legislative framework at the moment we are still developing economy we are developing our approach towards our submarine cables where we are still figuring out how to go about it so i think we are still not very sure how we will go about you know protection in that regard i was

you know suggesting that how australia did it like first develop your legislative framework which will enable you to provide that kind of physical protection your law enforcement agencies such as your navies or coast guard or whatever you may have for you know maritime protection law enforcement it would be you know empowered by those legislative frameworks so that is a kind of framework I also suggested for Indian government to do and the zones I was suggesting that it's not necessary that entire area of EEZ can be covered. We have more than 2.02 million square kilometer area, which is not much from Australia's perspective.

From Indian perspective, it is a lot more like a lot of area in terms of maritime domain to have a protection on submarine cables. So what I suggested was instead of going for entire EEZ, we can locate those areas based on the density of cables or maybe calculating the vulnerability factors because from an Indian perspective, any submarine cables located near, you know, are shared near borders with Pakistan

or maybe, you know, other countries might be more vulnerable than other regions. So we can calculate that basis, you know. And we have 17 landing cables in Indian, southern Indian borders. So my idea was we can look based on these locations, based on the density of cables, we can decide on these areas and then we can suitably make our legislative frameworks, enable our maritime law enforcement agencies, maybe Coast Guard can

be given certain regions, certain region may be given to Navy, depending upon their, you know, capacities and capabilities of the time, because we still, you know, figuring out in the, that capacity capability factor between the two maritime law enforcement agencies. I'm going to go slightly off script here to ask a follow-up question because the more that I read your paper and the more that I listen to your talk I'm just trying to figure out what is the possible counter-argument I actually cannot understand since you have made the argument why every country does not have a regime somewhat like this because it's not just India that's dependent on the submarine cables every country in the world is pretty dependent on it so I guess

I don't understand what the possible counter argument would be here other than, well, it's complex to pass legislation no matter what you're unless it's an autocracy and one person can do it, in which case you probably have some other problems. But that's either here or there. So are there counter arguments or is someone pushing back against this or is it just not a legislative priority at this point? currently i think is first of all is the knowledge about submarine cables because still now submarine cables were like we have several agencies working you know currently the submarine cables are under the telecommunications department of india and the the protection has to be done then the indian legal system has to come into picture they need to be you know told that how and why are submarine cables and they are important and therefore then the protection part for the protection part we need to bring together the navy the coast guard

the marine police and all so there's so many uh agencies that need to come together to work on it and i think the agencies that are working on it do not have the legislative power uh to protect it and the agencies that do the legislative work like the judiciary they still need to evolve to the you know factor they need to be taught they will need to be enlightened about the factor that this is one area we do not have our domestic laws in place and we need to work on that. So I think a lot of agencies need to work together at the moment. Well, your last answer kind of touched on the next thing that I want to talk about, which is what assets does India have to enforce this regime as what it has sufficient? Because it's one thing to say, you know, two million square mile EEZ,

that's almost impossible for any country in the world. But when you talk about 17 cables, that seems to be much more manageable so yeah so at the moment sadly we do not have much estates neither for protection on the ground when the weather submarine cables land because this has been told by people who access these cables on ground that basic lock is not even available to where the submarine cables land you know so it can be even you know broken by some you know thief or something then you just can take you know do some kind of damage for petty money and all so from the basic protection we need uh you know we need to develop it further so right now we do not have any assets on ground we do not have any regimes working in fact the

even if there is any damage we do not have any uh in-house uh submarine cable or you know team which can do the repair and servicing. We either depend upon UAE or we depend upon Japan and other countries which have the capabilities to even do the repairing. And every time we have to do the repairing, it takes us back by three weeks. So I think that we need to work from the ground level up.

We do not have anything at the moment. Well, then a final question. What is your recommendation for further expanding these types of frameworks? yeah so i think i'm saying in the same paper i was thinking that not just as you also mentioned it's not that only india and australia can do it a lot more other countries can you know develop these kind of cable protection zones within the region and ir however the problem becomes the capacities of these countries most of these countries are underdeveloped in developing

countries they're all trying to develop they're all digital is a major part of their you know development so but they do not have the capability to do it so how can we do and also the factor is uh indian ocean region which is also a difficult area to operate upon and a lot of scientists within india have told that it's not easy to operate in indian ocean at least when it comes to subsea domain uh the bathymetry is different the salinity is different and it's still time to figure out that how to operate under sea for longer showers so these kind of capabilities and this is absent within through when india does not have it i'm very sure that even other countries are also looking for the same so why not have a region-wide um you know cable submarine protection

zone where countries can come come in you know join hands with whatever uh um resources they might have and they can work together in having a ior based uh you know cable protection regime and uh this can be worked up under existing regimes also i was suggesting if iora can do it i under iora india australia and a lot more uh indian ocean countries are already partners so iora can be one platform where it can be taken quad was another because quad also announced their own um you know marine undersea cable protection um you know a framework also so there are frameworks which are existing at the moment. We just need to use those frameworks. These frameworks would provide us not only the resources and the training, but they will also, so India,

these countries do not need to go and replicate these efforts. They just need to plug in into the existing system, which has been provided by these international and regional organizations. So that kind of idea I was just trying to put through. Well, I'm sorry, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Pooja Bhatta. Pooja, where can we find you online and what are you working on next there are certain good projects online uh which i'm working on and you should one of the thing is the book project with blue security that i am doing so i'm writing a chapter on india's maritime approach and how it's developed over the years and what are the what what shapes india's maritime approach and behavior so that is one chapter i'm doing for

blue security apart from that i'm doing certain smaller projects writing projects apart from that And you can always find me on Twitter. I'm also active on LinkedIn. So this is the social media where you can find me most. And my email is there with you as it is. Well, thank you again for joining us today. Those projects sound fascinating. So when that blue security comes out, if you want to come back,

I would love to talk with you about sort of India's approach to maritime security and the way that it's developed over the years. But to listeners. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to see what else is in that book too, because I feel like there's probably a couple episodes in there. But to the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for having me, Chad. It was lovely talking to you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you for watching.